I used to really hate emotion. I didn’t think it was logical to trust your feelings. What do your emotions know? They’re just a distraction or an obstacle to doing the reasonable thing. As it turns out, intuition is ridiculously helpful. Our subconscious awareness is way ahead of our conscious awareness a lot of the… Continue reading Compassion as a Prerequisite to Questioning
The mask I’m grieving is a forced smile. This makes therapy difficult, because many of the solutions to depression include focusing on the positive. My counselors have said they’re working with a rare case – usually they work depressed people toward seeing the bright side of life, but I worked my way to depression through positivity. I… Continue reading When Positivity is the Problem
Trigger warnings: current events and politics “By voting, you are complying. You are complying to a preexisting system. I think we need real significant change, and that real change won’t come if enough people are complying. While you see voting as expressing yourself, I see it as compliance with the system.” -Russell Brand, who explains not… Continue reading How I Got Burned Out On Current Events and Politics by Age 19
Note from April 9, 2021: This post was first published on October 27, 2014. I just found it this morning among my unpublished drafts, and decided to write a note here for the 468(!!) of you who will be getting this old piece of writing among your emails today. I take your attention seriously and… Continue reading Appreciating the Ride
I wasn’t the type of kid who liked dolls or toys. I wanted everything to be as real as possible. Play-food annoyed me, because it looked tempting, but I couldn’t eat it. I spent time in the real kitchen at an early age because I wanted to experience what I was making. If I read… Continue reading Thoughts on Being an Adult with Imaginary Friends (The Gilbert Post)
Fundamentalism may exist in a black-and-white world. But saying it’s full of the logical thinkers, and those outside it are in a murky cloud of gray with no sense of justice, is giving it way too much credit. I know because I used logic, and I saw colors beyond my simplistic black-on-white battle lines. It… Continue reading The Gray Area Problem
This post has been re-uploaded as part of the Archive Restoration Project. My brain is constantly coming up with ideas and I can’t get it to stop. I was on the phone one day a few weeks back and I saw a gate. It reminded me of The Secret Garden, a book I read more than… Continue reading Chesterton, Children, and the Death of Curiosity
I first found it when working at camps with young children. When I was seventeen, I volunteered at a horse vaulting camp. My group was full of little girls, aged seven and eight, who had to learn how to do tricks while riding horses. One girl in my group suffered from serious phobias, including a… Continue reading A Moment I Live For
There’s too much pain surrounding this post to speak in general terms. I must keep it metaphysical, and perhaps it will reach a deeper level than my usual explanatory language. It’s discouraging to learn that, to quote a poet: “how you see it from where you’re sitting, it’s probably 110% different.” I’ll say it anyway.… Continue reading The Comfort of Books and Dreams
Repost: this article is highly problematic – the first few sentences demonstrate how the young children in my family were traumatized and lived in fear. My response to being overwhelmed was to dissociate. I’ve preserved it because it is a good example of how I once responded to stress. Zechariah woke up disconcerted, and started… Continue reading Sprinklers in the Rain